The subject matter disclosed herein relates to combined launch and mission vehicles and, more particularly, to a launch vehicle for use with a vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft.
A vertical take-off and landing aircraft (VTOL) is an aircraft that can take off, land and hover in a vertical direction and that can conduct flight operations in a horizontal orientation. VTOL aircraft may be manned (i.e., piloted) or unmanned in the case of remotely piloted or autonomous aircraft and may be housed or stowed in places with limited deck and storage areas, such as naval ships.
Often, VTOL aircraft have a fixed wing configuration with the landing gear permanently affixed to the fixed tail surfaces. In these cases, the VTOL aircraft sits in its grounded condition on the landing gear so that its nose cone faces upwardly. During take-off operations, an engine(s) of the VTOL aircraft drives its rotors at high speeds to cause the VTOL aircraft to lift off from the ground. As the take-off operations transition into flight operations, the VTOL aircraft is maneuvered from a vertical orientation into a mission appropriate horizontal orientation.
Execution of the take-off operations is highly costly in terms of the amounts of fuel required to take-off from a hover. This amount of fuel would normally have to be carried by the VTOL aircraft, which has a limited fuel capacity. Thus, the expense of fuel during the take-off operations necessarily leaves a decreased amount of fuel left over for mission operations especially including cruise and loiter which consequently limits the scope of such mission operations.